Rebel Ireland 


BY 


REDFERN MASON 


‘i? 


PRICE 75 CENTS 


PUBLISHED BY THE AUTHOR 
450 GRANT AVENUE 
SAN FRANCISCO 



















Rebel Ireland 

BY 

REDFERN MASON 

I! 


PRICE 75 CENTS 


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d * 

> 3 f> 


PUBLISHED BY THE AUTHOR 
450 GRANT AVENUE 
SAN FRANCISCO 


DM63 

.M3 


Copyright, 1923 
By 

REDFERN MASON 



J1JL17 ’23 

©cum 211 


[ 


Foreword 


U NTHINKING persons say the Irish 
are not fit to govern themselves, and 
they point to the civil war as proof of 
their assertion. Others regard the war as evi¬ 
dence of the clear-eyed vision and courage of 
the Republicans, and look with admiration on 
the little army of idealists who dare to assert 
the rights of the Irish nation in opposition to 
the British Empire. 

Which of these views is the just one? 

To learn the truth, the writer, an American 
of English birth, journeyed through Ireland to 
see and hear for himself. 

He went there hoping to find in the Free 
State a means by which the Irish could realize 
their aspirations and be a self-governing 
people. 

In these hopes he was disappointed. He 
found the soul of Erin with De Valera and his 
followers, and he returned to America a Re¬ 
publican. 

This book is the story of his experiences. 

San Francisco 
1923 







Rebel Ireland 

too*. 


Ireland at War 


W ELL do I remember my first intima¬ 
tion of the Irish genius. We had a 
servant named Mary, and all day long she 
would be singing about the house songs that 
were full of sadness. My boy’s heart went out 
in pity and I asked Mary what it was the Irish 
wanted. I shall never forget the sweetness 
with which she answered me. 

“I don’t know all about it rightly, my dear; 
but they want to be free.” 

That girl set something at work within me 
that has made me a rebel against every form 
of oppression. 

I told my mother what Mary had said. 
“Why shouldn’t the Irish govern themselves?” 
she exclaimed. But father talked politics. For 
him freedom meant the English code. He was 
a good man; but the national complex would 
not let him look facts in the face. 

And now, after many years’ absence, I find 
myself, an American citizen, back in Ireland, 
eager to listen to the whisperings of the Time 
Spirit from the lips of her ancient people. 


pQ REBEL * IRELAND 


It is a changed Dublin I see. The soldiers 
in the streets are the soldiers of Erin; the flag 
which flies from the Castle is the Green and 
Gold. 

But the great buildings on Sackville street 
are in ruins, torn by shot and shell. Here was 
the fighting during the Easter uprising; here, 
a few months ago, Irishman died at the hands 
of Irishman. 

The newspapers are full of accounts of 
fighting with the “Rebels.” It is curious read¬ 
ing. Never a word is permitted to appear which 
would suggest that these men are fighting for 
an ideal dearer to them than life itself. 

“The Irregulars seem to be getting the worst 
of it,” I remark to a girl whose acquaintance 
I made in California. 

Her face darkens. “Don’t call them that. 
They are the Irish Republican army. The gov¬ 
ernment under which they enlisted is still in 
existence, though the Free State has usurped 
its authority.” 

“The newspapers never use the word Repub¬ 
lican,” I retort. 

“Our scribes are Pharisees,” snaps the girl. 
“Only so much of the truth gets out as is fa¬ 
vorable to the Free State.” 

[ 8 ] 





IRELAND • AT • WAR PA 


“All the writers can’t be Free Staters, 
though.” 

“Go and see them for yourself. You’ll soon 
find out how matters stand.” 

And I do go. I find men on the “Freeman’s 
Journal” writing Free State articles and think¬ 
ing Republican thoughts. 

“Needs must when the devil drives,” one of 
them grumbles. “I’ve a family to support and 
I’d be out of a job if I wrote what I thought.” 

“Isn’t that intellectual prostitution?” 

“You wouldn’t be so damned logical if your 
living depended on it, maybe,” shouts the man. 
“Wait till the time comes. We’ll change our 
tune then.” 

Nearly all the men have Republican sympa¬ 
thies. But the Free State has a strangle-hold 
on the paper and it only exists by subservience. 

But, though the government has garroted 
the press, in every hotel parlor, among groups 
gathered on street corners, on the street cars, 
I hear open condemnation of the Free State 
and the men who are at the head of it. 

People look at me keenly before they speak 
out. I tell them I am an American of English 
birth, come to Ireland to find out the truth for 
myself. 


[ 9 ] 




REBEL•IRELAND 






“God send more like you,” says a benevo¬ 
lent cleric whom I meet at dinner. “If you 
have an open mind and study the matter dis¬ 
passionately, you can only come to one con¬ 
clusion.” 

“But where is all this fighting to end?” I 
cry. “Ireland is being ruined and hatreds sown 
that will last for generations.” 

The priest smiles sadly. “Things are bad, I 
admit; but they might be much worse. If the 
Free State had been accepted without protest, 
Ireland would have declined to the estate of a 
mere dominion, and England would be able to 
say that the Irish were satisfied. But they are 
not satisfied and, if the civil war does no more 
than put on record Ireland’s irreconcilable pro¬ 
test against England having any hand in her 
affairs, the blood of her children will not have 
been shed in vain.” 

“Dominion government satisfies Canada.” 

“It doesn’t satisfy the French Canadians 
and, even if it did, you can’t draw a parallel 
between Canada and Ireland. Canada has 
never been made war on by England; Ireland 
has. Canada is far away and, if England did 
not treat her fairly, she would declare her in¬ 
dependence. Do you think the United States 


[ 10 ] 





<N IRELAND • AT • WAR 


would stand quietly by and see England make 
war on the Dominion ?” 

“And you think the fighting in Ireland is 
worth while merely as a protest ?” 

“I do. The Irish are a strange people and, if 
they pledged their word to accept England’s 
conditions, they would feel themselves ever¬ 
lastingly bound to keep it. But they have never 
done so. There has always been a group of 
men who held sacred the doctrine of independ¬ 
ence. Today the leader of that group is Eamonn 
de Valera and, so long as he is true to his be¬ 
lief, he will be the dearest of her sons to Erin.” 

I look curiously at my companion. “You’d 
be getting into trouble, father, if the hierarchy 
knew your views.” 

The priest’s eyes flash. “The bishops are 
good men and they mean well; but they are 
without vision. If the world were governed by 
ideas like theirs, it would be good-bye to free¬ 
dom. Rome is wiser, thank God, and we look 
to her to ratify the right of just rebellion.” 

Every night there is fighting in the streets. 
It begins about ten and continues till the small 
hours of the morning. Bullets sing past me as 
I make my way back to the Grosvenor. A hole 
in my bedroom window warns me that they 


[ ii ] 





PQ REBEL • IRELAND 


are no respecters of hotels. Last night a man 
was sniping from the roof. 

But the people go their way with smiling 
good-humor. At least their eyes are no longer 
offended by the sight of a foreign garrison, and 
they know in the heart of them the English 
will never come back. 

Just how the difficulties which confront 
them will be overcome they would be puzzled 
to say. But the bonds that have bound them 
for so long have been loosened, and they look 
to the future with confidence. 

Yet the treaty only gives them a relative 
measure of freedom. England has still the 
whip-hand; her appointive power makes it im¬ 
possible for the Free State government to be 
really Irish. 

What I want to learn is who the people are 
that voted for the Treaty. Does their accept¬ 
ance represent the will of the people? Do they 
speak for Ireland’s soul? 

It is from a young man in Armagh I get the 
best answer to this question. I visited the an¬ 
cient city to look at the fort of Emain Macha, 
the training ground of Cuchullin. 

“The election was fought on a register five 
years old,” he explains. “That disfranchised a 


[ 12 ] 





£4 IRELAND • AT • WAR 


considerable proportion of the young men. 
Those young men are the backbone of the Re¬ 
publican army. Add their number to those who 
voted for rejection and you would have a large 
majority against the treaty.” 

“Then the claim of the hierarchy that Eng¬ 
land’s offer has been accepted by the great 
body of the Irish people is not true?” 

The young man nods assent. “I’m ashamed 
to admit it,” he says; “but the great bulwark 
of English authority in Ireland today is the 
official element in the Catholic Church.” 

“And the actual majority, who are the peo¬ 
ple that form it?” 

“It is this way,” says my informant. “When 
the election was held Ireland was just emerg¬ 
ing from the long terror of the Black and Tans. 
Many voted for the treaty because they were 
sick of the fighting. Others did so because they 
thought the treaty might be regarded as an 
instalment and used as a lever to extort fur¬ 
ther concessions. And there were selfish folk 
who cared only for their pockets, Judases who 
sold Ireland for money. But the idealists were 
against the treaty, the young men and the 
women especially.” 

At the Dublin Horse Show, it isn’t the 


[ 13 ] 




REBEL • IRELAND 


£4 




horses that interest me, wonderful though they 
are. It is the dancing of the peasants, their 
carding and weaving, and, above all, the art 
exhibit. 

There are three paintings by an artist named 
Keating and always a crowd in front of them. 
They are scenes in the South and West during 
the regime of the Black and Tans. A govern¬ 
ment which censors the press ought to destroy 
these pictures. Those lads with the glory in 
their faces are not the stuff of which to make 
Free Staters. If George Washington had been 
driven to guerrilla warfare in the mountains of 
Virginia, as at one time he feared he might be, 
he and his followers would have looked like 
these heroes of Erin. 

Art in Ireland is necessarily Republican. 
Genius cannot immortalize souls that shrink 
from consequences. But it glories in these lads 
who have in their hearts “the firm resolve not 
to submit or yield. ,, 

I see Maude Gonne, superb and sad, as if 
Ireland’s sorrows were eating her heart out; 
AE passes by; he has the head of an Irish 
Vulcan. James Stephens is there, a leprehaun 
looking for another “Crock of Gold”; Sara All¬ 
good, too, own daughter to Kathaleen ny Hou- 


[ 14 ] 





IRELAND • AT • WAR 


lahan, and Mia Cranwill, who makes brooches 
in the image of that of Tara. They are the 
prophets of renascent Erin, the avatars of a 
civilization which aims to make life beautiful. 

A familiar voice greets my ear. It is Mon¬ 
signor Rodgers of San Francisco, come to Holy 
Ireland to get marble and stained glass and 
vestments for his Church of St. Patrick in the 
city by the Golden Gate. One of the windows 
is to picture the flight of the black vultures 
from Erin. 

Patrick had a vision. He saw hovering over 
Erin great evil birds, and under the shadow of 
their wings was desolation. They were the 
Saxon invaders, who were to come across the 
Eastern sea and for centuries to darken the 
face of Ireland by their presence. Moved to 
pity for his people, the saint prayed that the 
strangers might depart, and God granted him 
his wish. 

That flight of the birds of evil omen is the 
desire of the Irish people. The Free Staters 
want it as well as the Republicans; but they 
compromise with their ideal. The dismantled 
constabulary barracks which greet my gaze 
wherever I go tell a different story. On the 
wall of a barn in County Wicklow I read the 


[ 15 ] 





REBEL • IRELAND 






words, “Vote for Duffy and the dead of Ireland 
will rise up and curse you.” The man who 
wrote that was wise in the ways of English 
statecraft. 

Everywhere the stranger is suspect. I am 
driving through County Limerick in a jaunting 
car, when a man dashes out of a cottage, gun 
in hand, and stops our conveyance. He looks 
me over, exchanges a few words with the jar- 
vey. “Drive on,” he says abruptly; “he is an 
American.” 

“A dog couldn’t get by and he not see it,” 
says the driver. 

“You must be in with both sides,” I remark. 

“Yes, and know how to keep my mouth 
shut,” the man answers. “I don’t want to be 
found dead on the road, with a piece of paper 
pinned to my coat.” 

At Newcastle West the waitress is surly. 
She cannot make out what I am here for. But, 
when I ask her to direct me to the house of the 
parish priest, she changes her manner. 

Acquaintance with the priesthood, however, 
is not always an “Open Sesame.” On the door 
of a little chapel I find posted a letter. It be¬ 
gins, “Reverend and up till now respected 
father,” and warns the padre that, if he con- 


[ 16 ] 





PQ IRELAND • AT • WAR P9> 


tinues to preach against the Republic, he and 
his parishioners will quarrel. 

Both Free Staters and Republicans advise 
me to carry military passes. 

“Suppose the Republicans find me in pos¬ 
session of a Free State pass,” I object. 

“It may go hard with you,” they admit. 

So I am armed with no other papers than my 
American passport. Both sides respect that; 
so do the English Tommies who search me on 
the train in Fermanagh. 

Beyond Newcastle I can only make my way 
West by car or on foot, for the bridges are 
down and no trains are running. I tramp a 
good fifty miles, fording streams, scrambling 
over ruined bridges, chatting with any friendly 
soul whom chance may send my way. 

Crossing the shattered arch of a bridge in 
Kerry, I am stopped by a man with a gun, his 
head tied up with a bloody kerchief. 

“What are you doing in Ireland?” he de¬ 
mands sternly. 

“Trying to find out what you fellows are 
fighting for,” I reply. 

“What do you want to know for?” 

“To tell the truth to the people of America.” 

He lowers his weapon and motions me to a 


[ 17 ] 





REBEL • IRELAND 


& 




seat beside him on the greensward. A group 
of ragged men, all armed, lie scattered about 
us. They listen to our talk in silence. 

“Why aren’t you in uniform?” I inquire. 

“We’ve got no uniforms, except a few taken 
from the Free Staters.” 

“What are you fighting for?” 

“To make Ireland free, that’s what we are 
fighting for. Every man of us has taken an 
oath to go on fighting till Ireland has won her 
independence.” 

“Do you get paid?” 

“Not a penny. Where’s the money to come 
from?”—and the man laughs. “We need it all 
for ammunition.” 

“And how do you live?” 

“The people feed us. If they won’t, we take 
what we need, and give them a note on the 
Irish Republic.” 

“Rather hard on the people, don’t you 
think?” 

“It’s hard on us, too, away in the hills, half 
the time wet to the skin, hunted like dogs.” 

He brings himself up short and looks me in 
the eyes. 

“Are you for us?” 

“Yes, I am for you.” 


[ 18 ] 





PQ IRELAND • AT • WAR t* 


And our hands grip. 

“Then tell the people of America we are 
fighting for liberty, like they did. They’ll un¬ 
derstand that, I’m thinking.” 

Everyone is not so kindly disposed towards 
Americans, however. In the hotel parlor at 
Athenry a young priest breaks out with ironic 
vehemence: 

“We are infinitely obliged to you Americans 
for the money you send us and your kind 
words of encouragement, and we are full of ad¬ 
miration for the discretion which makes you 
stay at home to save your precious skins.” 

I bridle up. “If it wern’t for the poor Irish 
girls of New York, you’d lack powder and shot 
to fight with.” 

“That’s true,” and the tone is kindlier; “but 
where are the fellows who shout for Erin on 
the Seventeenth of March? Why aren’t they 
over here helping us?” 

In the hearts of the mothers there is trouble. 
The boys go away and God knows whether 
they will ever come back. I stayed for a couple 
of days with an old lady at Onascaul, between 
Tralee and Dingle. 

“It’s terrible,” she moans, “to see them 
seated here at night, brothers and cousins to- 


119 ] 





REBEL • IRELAND 


& 




gether, and know they are hating one another 
in their hearts. The young lads steal glances 
towards the door. I know what is in their 
minds. They want to be off in the mountains 
with the fighting men. Oh, my dear,” and she 
bursts into tears, “won’t it ever end?” 

Yet the dear soul loves the Rebels. All 
the women do. The Free State arouses little 
enthusiasm. The chambermaid at Tralee, a 
black-eyed Nora, all ablaze with passion, rages 
against the soldiers of the government. 

“I don’t know where they get them,” she 
cries. “It must be from the slums of Dublin 
they come. We liked the Tommies better. They 
were nice clean lads and, after all, they were 
only doing their duty. Besides, every one of 
them had an Irish sweetheart and, if the Tans 
were up to any new devilment, he’d be sure to 
tell her.” 

Nora has a full capacity for vindictiveness. 
A girl betrayed the whereabouts of three Re¬ 
publicans, and the Free Staters arrested them. 
“We know who she is,” says the girl viciously, 
“and we’ve got it in for her.” 

Such bitterness is rare, however; the soldiers 
on both sides try to avoid killing one another. 
They look forward to the time when they may 


[ 20 ] 





^ IRELAND * AT • WAR 


be fighting shoulder to shoulder. In Listowell 
I hear of a Free State soldier who caught a 
neighbor sniping from the housetop. 

“I know you, John Buckley,” he called out. 
“I don’t want to shoot you; but I’ll have to, if 
you don’t come down.” 

And John came down. 

In Dublin they told me of two partners. Dur¬ 
ing the day the Free Stater drilled with the 
volunteers; in the evening the Republican 
went sniping. Business was carried on as usual. 

A nun in Tralee related a remarkable case 
of mutual forbearance. There were two broth¬ 
ers in command of opposing units. They met 
in action. For a few moments the pair stood 
looking at each other. Then one spoke up. 

“Michael, by all that is right I ought to shoot 
you. But I can’t do it. Take off your coat, man, 
and we’ll fight it out with our fists.” 

Never have soldiers been more loath to kill 
one another. The Free State soldiers shoot 
over the heads of their opponents. The slaying 
of Michael Collins was lamented by the Re¬ 
publicans themselves. It was the breach of an 
unwritten understanding. 

All the killing that has taken place in Ire¬ 
land since the beginning of hostilities would 


[ 21 ] 





fiQ REBEL • IRELAND P*> 


not equal the casualties of a single engagement 
in the great war. 

It could hardly be otherwise, for the ma¬ 
jority of the Free Staters love the ideal which 
led the Republicans to take up arms. They, too, 
have dreamed of an Ireland which should be 
free. They try to crush the Rebels, not because 
they think they are wrong, but because they 
think they are fighting for an unrealizable 
ideal. 

If England had interfered and inaugurated 
another reign of terror, Free Staters and Re¬ 
publicans would have joined forces and turned 
upon the common enemy. 

Upon a united Ireland England would be 
powerless to impose her will. You cannot sub¬ 
due people who will die rather than surrender. 

That is the temper of the Irish people. They 
are deathlessly enamored of freedom. This 
love they are expressing, not on the field of 
battle only, but in art, in their folk-lore, and in 
industry. 


[ ^ ] 





THE • REBEL • TRADITION 


The Rebel Tradition 

HPHROUGH seven centuries of alien rule the 
thought of the Irish has expressed the 
spirit of rebellion. 

Their literature is a literature of revolt; their 
music throbs with indignation; the tales and 
legends of the peasantry are the tradition of a 
people robbed of their birthright. 

When their feelings craved a voice, the Irish 
instinctively turned to the folk-song. A son of 
the soil, made a poet by his country’s suffer¬ 
ings, would pour forth his heart in song and, 
wedded to some ancestral melody, the words 
gave utterance to what was felt by all. Men 
sang the song as they followed the plow, the 
girls at the spinning-wheel, mothers to their 
little ones. Unrecorded in writing it lived on by 
a tenure purely spiritual, gripping the fancy of 
the people with deathless endearment. 

In the twelfth century, when the English 
denied to Irish youth the use of the coulin, 
their ancestral headdress, popular resentment 
came to flower in one of the most beautiful 
folk-tunes in the world. The words are lost; 
but the melody lives on, token of a spirit 
stronger than the will of kings. 

123 ] 





REBEL • IRELAND 


& 




The thing forbidden became a symbol. It 
was so with the shamrock. The little plant 
which St. Patrick used to explain the doctrine 
of the Trinity symbolizes in its tiny loveliness 
all that Irishmen hold dear. When the English 
forbade its being worn some unknown poet 
pilloried their stupidity in a line of immortal 
irony: 

“The shamrock is forbid by law to grow in 
Irish ground/’ 

As well seek to stifle the passion which gives 
it birth as try to silence a song. Forbidden to 
sing of Ireland, the people expressed them¬ 
selves in allegory. Erin became the Little 
Black Rose and the Silk of the Kine; men sang 
their devotion to Kathaleen ny Houlahan and 
Grania Wael. 

The old songs enshrined the past; they 
dreamed of the glory to come. They were his¬ 
tory; they were sentiment; they were proph¬ 
ecy. England sent the singers to jail; she exiled 
them, hanged them from the gallows. In vain! 
The more they were persecuted, the more the 
people cherished their songs. 

When a man suffered by the Saxon law, as 
did Shane O’Dwyer of the Glen, or flouted it 
successfully, like Ned of the Hill or Rory 


124 ] 





THE • REBEL • TRADITION 


O’More, his exploits were chanted in every 
Irish home. 

These songs are a poetic chronicle of the 
people. Would we know the condition of the 
people after the Williamite wars, we shall find 
it in the verse of Shane Clarach MacDonnell 
and David O’Brudar. 

“One single foot of land there is not left to 
us,” says the latter, “even as alms from the 
state. No, not what one may make his bed 
upon; but the state will accord us the grace— 
strange!—of letting us go safe to Spain to seek 
adventures.” 

And, with Durer-like strength of line, Mac¬ 
Donnell etches us the portrait of an English 
squire who had thrust himself into the estate 
of an Irishman: 

“Beautiful is his castle, living in the high- 
gabled, lighted-up mansion of Brian; but tight- 
closed is his door, and his churlishness shut up 
inside of him, in Aherlow of the fauns, in an 
opening between two mountains, until famine 
cleaves to the people, putting them under its 
sway. 

“His gate he never opens to the moan of the 
unhappy wretches; he never answers their 
groans, nor provides food for their bodies; if 


[ 25 ] 





REBEL • IRELAND 


t*? 




they were to take so much as a little faggot or 
a scollop or a crooked rod, he would beat 
streams of blood out of their shoulders. ,, 

The people turned with yearning to the fight¬ 
ing men who had fled to the continent—the 
“Wild Geese,” as they called them in pathetic 
hope of their return. A girl who grieved to see 
her lover go, but was too good an Irishwoman 
to bid him stay, sang: 

I’ll sell my rock, I’ll sell my reel, 

I’ll sell my only spinning-wheel, 

To buy for my love a coat of steel, 

Is go d-teidh tu, a mhuirnin slan. 

When the people starved, and there was 
none to feed them, it was in the folk-song that 
poured forth their sorrow. Three verses, so 
poignant that they seem the cry of God’s little 
ones, tell of the Great Hunger of 1849 : 


Oh, the praties they are small. 
Over here! over here! 

Oh, the praties they are small 
Over here! 

Oh, the praties they are small 
And we dig them in the fall, 
And we eat them, skins and all, 
Full of fear, full of fear. 


[ 26 ] 





THE • REBEL • TRADITION 


Oh, I wish we all were geese, 

Night and morn, night and morn! 

Oh, I wish that we were geese, 

Night and morn. 

Oh, I wish that we were geese, 

For they live and die in peace, 

Till the day of their decease, 

Atin corn, atin corn. 

Oh, we’re down into the dust, 

Over here! Over here! 

Oh, we’re down into the dust, 

Over here! 

Oh, we’re down into the dust, 

But the God in Whom we trust 
Will yet give us crumb for crust, 

Over here! Over here! 

Today the making of folk-songs is ended. 
But the spirit which begat them is still alive. 
I talked of this matter with AE, the great 
Irishman who puts poetry into economics. 

“The Irish have a genius for mythology,” 
said he. “When a man’s personality impresses 
their imagination, they weave a legend round 
him. They have done so with Griffiths and De 
Valera. Why, I believe there is a myth about 
me. These legends they tell in poetry. This 
courteous and relatively bloodless war is giv¬ 
ing occasion to a veritable flowering of poetry.” 

AE tells truth. The leaders of the Easter 
Uprising were not only fighters; they were 


[ 27 ] 





<5*1 REBEL • IRELAND ^ 


poets. Padraic Pierse, the martyred first presi¬ 
dent of the Republic, proclaimed himself a 
rebel in verse which proves him one of the 
great succession of Irish singers: 

I am come of the seed of the people, the people that 
sorrow, 

That have no treasure but hope, 

No riches laid up but a memory 
Of an ancient glory. 

My mother bore me in bondage, in bondage my 
mother was bom; 

I am of the blood of serfs. 

The children with whom I played, the men and 
women with whom I have eaten, 

Have had masters over them, have been under the 
lash of masters, 

And, though gentle, have served churls. 

The hands that have touched mine, the dear hands 
whose touch is familiar to me, 

Have worn shameful manacles, have been bitten at 
the wrist by manacles, 

Have grown hard with the manacles and the task¬ 
work of the strangers. 

I am flesh of the flesh of these lowly; I am bone of 
their bone, 

I that have never submitted, 

I that have a soul greater than the soul of my peo¬ 
ple’s masters, 

I that have vision and prophecy and the gift of fiery 
speech. 

I that have spoken with God on the top of His holy 
hill. 

When Pierse wanted to know what Ireland 

[ 28 ] 





THE • REBEL • TRADITION 


wanted, he did as Eamonn de Valera does; he 
looked into his own heart. There he found the 
truth, and for that truth he laid down his life. 

But it was more than political independence 
that he wished. People may have freedom, yet 
be sordid and material. He wanted what the 
bards and singers and story-tellers wanted— 
the love of beauty without which life is a sor¬ 
did boon. 

What this beauty is that the Irish crave no 
one has brought home to me more persuasively 
than has Arthur Darley. Darley is a musician 
and the genius of the race sings through his 
fiddle. No piano can express the subtleties of 
Gaelic melody. Nay, its nuances are too deli¬ 
cate to be crystallized in modern notation. But 
Darley’s violin voices all the lights and fine 
shades. It is lyrical; it is capable of passionate 
indignation; humor flashes through the mist of 
sorrow and, pervading all, is the mysticism of 
the Gael. 

He plays me “The Song of Oonagh,” talking 
the while of Fairy Mab and how she glides by 
in the moonlight, her hair like yellow corn; he 
recalls the “Lament of Deirdre” and, in my 
mind’s eye, I see the white-armed Helen of the 
Gael; his bow evokes the old tune of stricken 
Ireland, “Uileacan dubh O’: 

[ 29 ] 





REBEL • IRELAND 






Take my first blessing ever to dear Eire’s strand, 
Fair hills of Eire O! 

To the remnant that love her—our forefathers’ land, 
Fair hills of Eire O! 

How sweet sing the birds o’er mount there and vale, 
Like soft-sounding chords that lament for the Gael, 
And I o’er the surge, far, far away must wail 
The fair hills of Eire O! 


Every year Darley and his family betake 
themselves to Glencolumcille in Donegal. 
There the Gaelic sap runs freely. The native 
lore springs spontaneously to the lips of the 
people. 

“On the vigil of Christmas,” he tells me, 
“they light a candle and place it in the window, 
so that the Blessed Virgin may see, if she is 
going by with her child, and know there is a 
welcome for her. One year it was bitterly cold 
and the snow lay thick on the ground. An old 
couple were seated in their cottage, when there 
came a knock at the door. The pair looked at 
each other in surprise, for they lived in an out- 
of-the-way place, and wayfarers were few. The 
man of the house opened the door, and there 
stood a young woman with a baby in her arms. 

“ ‘May I come in and sit by the fire and 
warm myself and the child?’ said the stranger. 

“ ‘Come in and welcome,’ said the old man, 


[ 30 ] 





THE • REBEL • TRADITION 


and the goodwife drew up a chair for the 
woman to be seated. 

“ ‘You saw the candle in the window, may¬ 
be?’ said the old dame. 

“ ‘I did,’ answered the young woman. 

“She sat by the fire, crooning her little one 
and, as they looked upon her, the old folks 
wondered at her beauty. The more they gazed, 
the lovelier she seemed to grow. Awe came 
upon them. 

“ ‘Now I must be going on my way,’ said 
the stranger. ‘I thank you for your kindness 
and I pray God to bless all in this house.’ 

“ ‘It’s no time for a poor soul to be abroad,’ 
pleaded the old woman. ‘Won’t you be staying 
with us the night?’ 

“ ‘No, I have other homes to visit, and I 
must be on my way.’ 

“So she was gone, and it came to the old 
people that their home had sheltered the 
Mother of God and the Child Jesus.’’ 

Darley plays me the old lullaby, which he 
noted down out there in Glencolumcille, and 
his eyes are bright with the wonder of it. 

As we sit talking and playing, who should 
come in but Kathleen O’Brennan and, with 
her, Sara Allgood of the Abbey Theatre. Kath- 


[ 3i ] 





REBEL • IRELAND 






leen is one of those who dream of the Ireland 
that is to be and she works to make it a 
reality; Sara sings old Gaelic songs, full of 
yearning and indignation. 

And it comes over me with the force of a 
revelation that it is the things of the spirit 
that have kept the Irish constant to their ideal 
through so many years of suffering. Material 
prosperity alone will never satisfy them. They 
seek that winged happiness of the mind which 
w’as their forefathers’, when they sat together 
in the long twilight and heard the shanachie 
tell stories of Diarmuid and Grainne and the 
Red Branch knights. 

In these tales the folk is artist. Read them 
in the collections of Douglas Hyde and Lady 
Gregory. They are full of an ingenuous art and 
rich with the sap of the race. 

The first to teach me the spell these stories 
exercise over the Irish mind was Seumas 
Moriarity. Seumas tends the flowers in a city 
park in San Francisco. He comes from Smer- 
wick, in Kerry, where he followed the life of a 
fisherman. This is what he said to me—his 
very words: 

“We’d all sit around the room and tell tales 
that lasted till it was well on into the night, 


[ 32 ] 





THE * REBEL * TRADITION 


wonderful tales and we believing every word 
of them. Talk about schools! Never were 
schools like those gatherings in the old home, 
with no light but the peat fire, and a song in 
the heart of every man, woman and child that 
was there. Do you think I’d be wanting to go 
back to Smerwick if they built a factory there? 
I wouldn’t set foot in the place. But to hear the 
croon of the Gaelic and the old songs I’d 
known from a child: that was happiness. Why, 
in Smerwick a girl wouldn’t look at a man 
that couldn’t sing. Every year, when the time 
came to dig the potatoes, my father would hire 
a man to help us, and he always chose the man 
who could tell the best tale and sing the best 
song. You couldn’t shoo a dog from the door 
in Smerwick without a song. The happiest 
people in all the world they are, for all they 
are poor.” 

When I set out from Dingle to visit Seumas’ 
old mother and give her news of her lad, the 
driver asked me if I knew anyone in the place, 
for there was no inn to put up at. 

“There’s a man named Moriarity in America, 
and I promised to visit his people; he’s a 
gardener.” 

But the jarvey shakes his head. 


[ 33 ] 





PQ REBEL • IRELAND ^ 


“He writes about the old Irish poets and 
teaches Gaelic,” I add. 

The man gives a shout. “Why, that must be 
the Spalpin fanach. Now I know your man; all 
the country knows him. Only say you come 
from the Spalpin and every door in the village 
will open to you.” 

And it turns out just as he says. Never shall 
I forget that village, with its less than a score 
of cottages, nestling at the foot of the little 
hills they call the Three Sisters and below 
them the rock-fringed harbor that opens out 
on the stormy Atlantic. 

It is like a page from one of Synge’s plays. 
The old mother in her unwonted shoes and 
stockings to greet the stranger, the little boy 
and girl crouched almost in the embers, the 
great iron pot swinging over the fire, Seumas’ 
cradle that looks like a boat—his latest niece 
in it, the fishnets drying beneath the rafters, 
the flagged floor, the simple chairs and table, 
not a thing about the room but what serves 
life’s bare necessities. It is a scene that might 
live in the canvas of a master. 

The men are away fishing or in the fields. 
But the children come racing in to see the man 
from America. Few strangers find their way 
to Smerwick nowadays. 

[ 34 ] 





THE • REBEL • TRADITION 


‘‘Didn’t you bring your fiddle?” demands the 
old lady. ‘‘We’d have got the boys and girls 
together and had a dance.” 

I look at her with admiration, inwardly curs¬ 
ing the fate that did not make me a fiddler. 
She has the face of one of God’s aristocrats, 
chiseled and firm as a cliff and, in her eyes, 
a look of deep understanding. I feel in the heart 
of me that of her type was the mother of the 
Maccabees. But her dear ones she has given 
to the devouring sea and to far-away America. 

The children drag me off to see the rocks 
at Dunglore and the bed of Diarmuid and 
Grainne. As we go on our way, I see the 
women washing clothes in the little stream 
and hear their voices raised in song. It is just 
as Seumas told me, and I wish the dear man 
were with me. 

A little gossoon, knee-high to a grasshopper, 
looks at me with challenge in his eyes. 

‘‘Irish is better than English,” says he. 

‘‘It is for you,” I reply. 

And one of the girls tells me about Grainne, 
how she was betrothed to Oscar, but eloped 
with Diarmuid. Oscar and his men followed 
hard after them and, all over Ireland, the 
people show the places where they rested in 
their flight. 


[ 35 ] 






REBEL • IRELAND 


“Did he catch them?” I ask. 

“He did and Diarmuid was killed by a boar.” 

“Rather a hard bed, don’t you think?” I ob¬ 
serve, contemplating the rocky shelf. 

“Maybe folks in love are not so particular,” 
and the little maid darts a look at me, not with¬ 
out a glint of feminine scorn. 

I stay at Ballyferriter, a mile’s walk from 
Smerwick, with William Long, who is a cousin 
of Seumas. William teaches Gaelic in a little 
school, and from him I learn what their native 
speech means to the people. A copy of the 
Tain Bo, lying on my table, makes cronies 
of us. 

I tell him of my visit to Smerwick and how 
the children took me to see the bed of Grainne. 

“Bless their hearts, of course, they did. But 
don’t say Smerwick; it means nothing. Call it 
Ardnaconnia, the Height of the Arbutus. 
There’s poetry in that.” 

My friend is silent for a while, lost in 
thought. Suddenly he breaks out: 

“It was bad enough for the English to take 
away our freedom. But they’ve done worse; 
they’ve tried to destroy our language. Yes, and 
there were Irishmen mean-spirited enough to 
help them. Here in Ballyferriter I saw a school- 


136 ] 





THE • REBEL • TRADITION 


inspector, a man named Daly, raise a warning 
finger and say to the children, ‘Let me not hear 
so much as one word of Irish.’ ” 

“The language has persisted in spite of him, 
though.” 

“Yes, thank God, and today Kerry is the 
school of Irish for the whole country. Now let 
us be going out. We’ll stroll over to Killybeg. 
’Tis there they say the fairies are.” 

“Did you ever see a fairy?” 

“I did not; but my old mother was in terror 
lest I should, and get the fairy stroke. On May 
Eve and Summer Ending she kept me indoors, 
for then, they say, the Little People are danc¬ 
ing on the hills and have great power over 
mortals.” 

It is the gloaming as we cross the fields, 
skirting the bog that separates us from Smer- 
wick. The scent of the hawthorn is in the air 
and the tinkling of cowbells. 

Climbing stiles and following many a little 
boreen, we make our way to the rath, with its 
mossy stones and the well that was once a 
font. 

“The name Killybeg tells us there was once 
a church here,” says Long. “Wherever you 
come across the prefix ‘kill,’ you may be sure 
you are on Christian ground.” 

[ 37 ] 





REBEL • IRELAND 


“There is a Kilgrimol in my native Lanca¬ 
shire,” I exclaim. 

“I wouldn’t doubt it. The Lancashire folk 
have Celtic blood in their veins.” 

And he lays his hand on my shoulder. 

“My lad, there is more in you than comes 
from sympathy for a people oppressed. It is 
the passion of the Celts, your forefathers, that 
stirs in you.” 

And we walk on, ruminating. 

“Tell me where you have been in Ireland,” 
says my companion, in the tone of one pursu¬ 
ing a train of thought. 

“At Armagh, up in the Northwest as far as 
Donegal, across the country and round about 
Dublin.” 

“That is enough to show you how much the 
genius of the race is knit up in the language. 
Armagh is the Hill of Macha; it takes us back 
to the times when Ireland was pagan; Donegal 
is the Fort of the Stranger; there the Danes 
got a hold. Ballyferriter here is the Town of 
the Ferriters. You tell me you are interested in 
music. Pierce Ferriter, who held the castle 
here in Elizabethan days, was a lover of the 
harp and he left us a poem in praise of it.” 

And, delving in his pocket, he produces a 


[ 38 ] 





THE • REBEL • TRADITION 


notebook. “I had it in mind to read you this,” 
he says. ”1 think you will agree with me that 
never was musical instrument more poetically 
sung.” 

The key of music and its gate, 

The wealth, the abode of poetry. 

The skilful, neat Irishwoman, 

The richly festive moaner. 

Children in dire distress, men in deep wounds, 
Sleep at the sounds of its crimson board; 
The merry witch has chased all sorrow, 

The festive home of music and delight. 

We sit down by the old well, but first Wil¬ 
liam plucks some rushes and scatters them on 
the water. “That’s for the Poukha,” he says. 
“Now he won’t harm us.” 

“Queer he should haunt a Christian shrine, 
don’t you think?” 

“ ’Twas malice he had in his heart, to be 
dwelling in the house of the enemy. But the 
people never forget there was once a church 
here, and every year, at Easter, they make the 
rounds and say their prayers.” 

“What did the saints say about the fairies?” 
I inquire. 

“They regarded them as evil spirits. ’Tis a 
common notion that, when Lucifer made war 


[ 39 ] 





REBEL • IRELAND 


P4 




on the Almighty, some of the angels were 
neither for God, nor against Him. So Michael 
shut up the devils in Hell, and the neutrals he 
dropped in Ireland.” 

“Dante was harder on them,” I observe. 

“The Irish deny them salvation though,” 
says my friend, “and that troubles the Little 
People. They’d like to be sure that, at the Last 
Day, they will be with the saved. But belief in 
the fairies is dying out, except the banshee. 
There’s pride in that. To have a banshee in the 
family is a patent of nobility, so to speak. And 
the people have a soft spot in their hearts for 
the Lenan Shee, the fairy mistress. She makes 
love to poets and musicians. Turlough O’Caro- 
lan had one, and, while he was asleep, she sang 
lovely melodies to him.” 

“It is as good a way of accounting for in¬ 
spiration as another,” I laugh. 

The next day my host puts his horse in the 
rig, and we set out for a drive along the coast. 

“That is Mount Brandon,” says he, pointing 
with his whip to the vast pile which looms 
Eastward. “On its top St. Brandon had his cell. 
He sailed away across the Atlantic and men 
say he reached America. They were great trav¬ 
elers, the ancient Irish. Their bells and crotals 


[ 40 ] 





THE • REBEL • TRADITION 


have been found as far North as Iceland. They 
founded monasteries in Germany, Switzerland 
and Italy. They converted Northumbria before 
Augustine set foot in Kent. Those who stayed 
at home established great schools, and the 
kings of England sent their sons to Ireland to 
be educated.” 

The landscape unfolds before us in an ever- 
varying tapestry of loveliness. We catch sight 
of Dingle, quiet and peaceful to all appearance. 
But there is a British destroyer in the bay and 
William smiles grimly. 

“The Republicans pepper her every now and 
then,” he says. “They believe she is helping the 
Free Staters. Across the water there, but you 
can’t see it, is Cahirciveen. They are fighting 
there now. And you see that headland? It was 
from the look-out tower on the top they 
sighted Sir Roger Casement’s ship.” 

“What a country of memories!” I exclaim. 

“Yonder are the mountains of Iveragh. It 
was from there Oisin set out for Tir-nan-Og 
and, when he came back, the Fianna were all 
dead and St. Patrick was making the country 
Christian. He and the saint wrangled. When 
St. Patrick spoke of the greatness of God, 
Oisin answered: ‘Were my son Oscar and God 


[ 41 ] 





REBEL • IRELAND ^ 


hand in hand on Knock-na-veen, if I saw my 
son down, it is then I would say that God was 
a strong man.’ ” 

At Ventry Harbor William recalls the la¬ 
ment of Crede for her husband, Cael, who was 
slain in the battle there: “Sore suffering and 
O suffering sore is the hero’s death, who used 
to lie by me. Sore suffering to me is Cael, and 
O Cael is a suffering sore, that by my side he 
is in dead man’s form, and that the wave 
should have swept over his white body, that 
is what has distracted me, so great was his 
delightfulness.” 

We dismount at a point where the cliffs 
hang beetling over the sea. 

“Here is the summer residence of the kings 
of Cashel,” says William, and we enter low 
structures of limestone flag, held together by 
sheer weight. A little farther on we see the 
“Beehives,” so-called from their shape. The 
antiquarians think the place was a sort of Irish 
Thebaid. 

The country is one vast library in which he 
who has the wit may read wonderful matter. 

“And it’s not all ancient, either,” says my 
guide. “Look at those great boulders by the 
side of the road. The people rolled them down 


[ 42 ] 





THE • REBEL • TRADITION 


from the heights to stop the Tans. But the 
Tans seized some of the men, put them in 
chains, and set them to work to clear the road. 
Ireland will not be forgetting that.” 

“She has a long memory,” I answer. “In Dub¬ 
lin I met an English officer who had been quar¬ 
tered in County Antrim. While he was there 
an old man died and the whole countryside 
turned out for the funeral. But, instead of 
going straight to the cemetery, the procession 
wound its way a couple of miles round. ‘Why 
didn’t you go over the bridge?’ asked the offi¬ 
cer. ‘And take the dead man over the bridge 
that Cromwell crossed!’ was the answer.” 

William smiles. “Maybe the bridge has 
been blown up and the next man to die will 
have a shorter ride.” 

Rounding Slea Head, we sight the Blaskets. 
William points them out to me, and the Skel- 
ligs, where the Danes got their first hold on 
Irish ground. After an hour’s ride, we come in 
sight of Sybil Head. 

“What would you say it looks like?” de¬ 
mands my companion. 

“It makes me think of a great bird,” I ven¬ 
ture. 

William nods, pleased. “They call it ‘Korin 

[ 43 ] 





<5^ REBEL • IRELAND 


un Fiac,’ which means the ‘Jaw of the Raven.’ 
Where is the sense of calling it Sybil Head? 
The Irish name gives you a picture of the 
place.” 

There is a pause, and he breaks out: “They 
say the Gaelic is not good for business. Didn’t 
the Almighty know what He was about when 
He taught it us? As if fishing and tilling the 
ground were not good enough for a people that 
has always got its living by them! Fancy this 
lovely country spoiled by factory smoke. What 
good will commercial prosperity do us, if it 
robs us of spiritual vision? Your English 
Wordsworth knew what I mean. He knew 
what England has lost by her greed for gain. 
You remember? 

The world is too much with us; late or soon, 

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. 

The Irish don’t mean to do that. It may seem 
folly to your industrial captains and men of 
science; but the Irish like to think that, when 
the baby smiles in its sleep, the angels are talk¬ 
ing to it. They hear voices in the wind; they 
sense the fight that goes on between the 
powers of good and evil for the possession of 
the passing soul. They see Tir-nan-Og in the 


[ 44 ] 





THE • REBEL * TRADITION 


Western clouds. Call it superstition, if you like. 
We wouldn’t exchange it for the wisdom—if it 
is wisdom—which takes the wonder out of 
life.” 

We drive up the village street. Evening is 
come and lights shine from the windows. “Dia 
Maria,” say the passersby and William returns 
the salutation. All is quiet, and I wonder 
whether, in all the world, there is a more 
peaceful spot than Ballyferriter. 

Returned to Dublin, I spend my evenings 
at the Abbey Theatre. There I hear the drama 
plead the cause of Erin. Through all the plays 
runs the same spirit. In “Mixed Marriages” it 
denounces the sinister policy that has used 
religion to divide the people; in “The Rising of 
the Moon” it is the poetry of rebellion; in 
“Kathaleen ny Houlahan” Ireland is calling 
her sons to battle. Sara Allgood is Kathaleen, 
and I feel the hearts of the audience beat faster 
as they look at her. 

In the art of the theatre, as in the songs, 
the music, and the tales of the people the rebel 
tradition is still active. 


[ 45 ] 





REBEL • IRELAND 


“Better Living” 


HE songs and poems and old-time dances, 



JL the comely homespun and the picture of 
the old mother at the spinning-wheel have 
made of the Irishman an artist, and now that 
he sees the dawn of a new era, he does not 
mean to degenerate into a factory operative. 

The social ideal of the Irish people is ex¬ 
pressed in the motto of Sir Horace Plunkett, 
“Better Living.” 

But they have it in mind to express that 
ideal in their own way, and it is a very differ¬ 
ent way from that which has made a “Black 
Country” of Staffordshire and an Inferno of 
the fairest part of Pennsylvania. 

Their aim is to harness science to the car of 
the general well-being, and to pursue business 
methods which will bring the people closer 
together, not split them up into classes with 
opposing interests. The system which con¬ 
verts invention into a tool for the enrichment 
of an industrial plutocracy they repudiate. 
They mean to place the fruits of man’s wit at 
the service of the poor. 

And, welcoming every new idea that seems 


[ 46 ] 





cN “BETTER • LIVING” ^ 


to have in it the element of real progress, they 
are averse to every innovation that will sacri¬ 
fice the charm of the old life. 

Industrialism is to be their servant, not a 
tyrant. 

In many parts of the country a beginning 
has been made in the movement which aims 
to produce a better social order. In the North¬ 
western corner of Donegal I have seen this 
movement exemplified in a way that should 
serve as a lesson to men and women all over 
the world. 

It was at Dungloe. My driver pointed with 
his whip to the co-operative store. “Ask for 
Paddy the Cope,” said he; “there’s not a 
woman in Dungloe who doesn’t thank God for 
the good he’s done.” 

I find my man in his little office. Middle- 
aged, with a round, clean-shaven face that 
dimples with good humor, Patrick Gallagher 
greets me affably. He is an unassuming man, 
yet he has worsted Ireland’s foes, both do¬ 
mestic and foreign. I spend the whole day 
with him and what I learn is a tale to give new 
wings to hope. 

At eight years old Patrick stood in a row of 
boys and girls at a fair and was hired out to 


[ 47 ] 





P4 “BETTER • LIVING” 


work on a farm for six months. He did every¬ 
thing on a farm that a boy can do, and for his 
six months’ services, he received £3—rather 
less than $2.50 a month. This continued, with 
a small increase of pay, till he was seventeen. 
Then he went to Scotland. 

What he earned was of little profit to him, 
however. All the money went into the pocket 
of the gombeen man, to keep up the little farm 
his parents worked at home. 

“The gombeen man is the money-king of 
the Irish village,” he explains. “Or rather he 
was—at least locally, for, in Dungloe, the co-op 
has put him out of business. Only a few years 
ago hardly a farmer in the parish was out of 
his clutches. Seventy-five per cent of the farm¬ 
ers were born in debt and never got out of it. 
And the people were so spiritless they didn’t 
try to. They rarely dared to ask how they 
stood. The gombeen men were all inter¬ 
married and formed a caste. They held the vil¬ 
lage in the hollow of their hand. They elected 
the district and county councillors; they were 
the local magistrates.” 

“But how could they?” I exclaim; “the 
people had the vote.” 

“Yes, and fifty per cent of the electors tied 


[ 48 ] 





“BETTER • LIVING” 






to the gombeeners for debt. We paid them a 
tribute of from fifty to a hundred per cent. The 
landlord never evicted anyone; but the gom¬ 
been men evicted many. When the co-op 
started, they boasted they would have every 
member out on the road.” 

'‘They didn’t succeed, though.” 

Gallagher smiles. “It wasn’t for lack of try¬ 
ing, though, They put up a stiff fight; but we 
won. Man, it’s like a fairy tale. We had no 
idea what a big thing we had put our hands to 
when we began, and many’s the setback we 
got. But we stuck together through thick and 
thin, and today the co-op has a turnover of 
more than £100,000 a year.” 

And he tells me how the movement origi¬ 
nated. 

“There were about a dozen of us, small 
farmers, and the fertilizer we got from the 
gombeen men didn’t satisfy us. It was super¬ 
phosphate of 22 per cent, and it cost us from 
£5 to£6 a ton. The trader told us we must 
take what he gave us and no other. So we 
wrote to the Department of Agriculture. They 
advised us to write to the Co-operative Whole¬ 
sale Society. But the organization would only 
supply societies; it would not sell to indi- 


[ 49 ] 






REBEL * IRELAND 


< 5*1 




viduals. That put an idea into our heads. We 
formed ourselves into a society and, right 
away, the fight was on. If we wouldn’t take 
their fertilizer, the middlemen wouldn’t sell us 
anything else. There was nothing for it but 
for us to become a general trading society. 
We did it and that was the beginning of the 
Dungloe Co-operative Society.” 

‘‘And the price of fertilizer?” 

“It came down and it remained down. Imme¬ 
diately the co-op started we were able to get 
thirty per cent superphosphate for £4 a ton 
and pay a dividend of two shillings in the 
pound to our members into the bargain. And 
that isn’t all. The gombeen men had forced 
us to become their competitors all along the 
line. We bought eggs from the people and 
sold them over the counter. In 1906 the gom¬ 
been man paid fivepence a dozen, and that 
paid in goods. We paid ninepence a dozen. 
Then the traders tried to corner the supply; 
but we sent out a cart to collect them from 
the farmers. Today eggs are bought from the 
members of the society at two shillings a 
dozen. The gombeen man has given up selling 
them.” 

Patrick conducts me through the busy estab- 

[ 5° ] 




“BETTER * LIVING” 






lishment. It resembles the general store of a 
small American town. The shelves are stocked 
with everything the housewife can desire, or 
the goodman either. There are sides of bacon. 
A bakery is at work, the only one in Dungloe. 

“Come upstairs now,” says he; “I’ll show 
you the most revolutionary thing we’ve done.’’ 

In a large room, lighted by electricity, we 
find a hundred girls at work. They are knitting 
half-hose with machines. Gallagher turns to 
one of the girls. 

“How much did you earn last week, Nora?’’ 

“Thirty shillings, sir.” 

“And you?”—to another girl. 

“Twenty-seven shillings.” 

“They average about twenty-five shillings a 
week,” says Gallagher. “You’ll hardly credit 
it; but a few years ago, girls were eating their 
hearts out, working from morning till night, 
to earn a paltry five shillings a week. And 
three hundred women work for us in their 
homes.” 

And, seating himself on a barrel, while I 
bestow myself on the edge of a counter, he 
tells me the story. 

“The people were so poor, you can hardly 
imagine it. They lived from hand to mouth 


[ 5i ] 





REBEL • IRELAND 




P*> 


and, oftener than not, the hand had nothing in 
it. Men tilled small patches of land—four or 
five acres. The sale of the produce was not 
enough to keep body and soul together. So 
they eked out their income by fishing. A family 
would earn about £15 a year by what they 
grew; the fishing brought them in about £8. 
It was not enough to live on, so the women 
knitted and their earnings came to about 
£4:10s.” 

“No wonder they are glad to save a few 
shillings by dealing at the co-op,” I exclaim. 

“Indeed it is no wonder. But let me tell you 
about the women and the knitting. To get the 
yarn they had to go to Glenties. It is fifteen 
miles away, and there is no railroad. The poor 
things could not have paid the fare, if there 
had been one. So they walked the whole way, 
there and back, and happy they were when 
they could get a lift from a cattle cart. When 
they reached home with the yarn they set to 
work to make half-hose of it. And hard work 
it was. The woman who knits two pair a day is 
good at the job.” 

“And the pay?” 

“A girl could earn about five shillings a 
week. But she was paid in goods—pinafores 


[ 52 ] 






‘‘BETTER • LIVING” 


^3 




and skirts for the children. What would you 
be saying of the two brothers who ran that 
business and died worth half a million ?” 

“It would take a lot of prayers to get them 
out of Purgatory, I fancy.” 

“Well, God be thanked, we’ve put an end 
to that,” says Patrick. “Today you’ll see three 
sisters of one family taking home as much as 
£4 at the end of the week. Think what that 
means to homes like the ones I’ve told you of.” 

“I don’t marvel the gombeen trust fights 
you.” 

“And a pretty fight they made of it, too. 
The informers were on our heels all the time, 
and men who hadn’t got out of the gombeen 
man’s clutches had to come to the store by the 
back way. When they failed to prevent our 
dealing in eggs, the traders withdrew their 
money from the Farmers’ Loan Bank. It 
helped the farmers, you see, and they didn’t 
want them to be helped. But we weathered 
the storm. Then the people put me up for the 
County Council. There was a fight for you. A 
man interrupted me when I was making a 
speech. I said I would deal with him later on. 
They pretended it was a threat and five magis¬ 
trates—gombeen men every mother’s son of 


[ 53 ] 





REBEL • IRELAND 


them—wanted to put me under bonds to be of 
good behavior. I wouldn’t do it and they 
clapped me into jail. Not for long, though. The 
people appealed to the Lords’ Justices in Dub¬ 
lin and word came for me to be set free at 
once. It was a regular triumph. From the bon¬ 
fires you would have thought it was St. John’s 
Eve.” 

“You were elected, of course?” 

“Yes, and it was the death-knell of the gom¬ 
been men.” 

Patrick rises. “Come down to the harbor 
with me. I want to show you something.” 

We stroll to the waterfront. From the rocks 
juts a pier on which men are working. 

“We have to thank America for that,” says 
Gallagher. “During the trouble with the Tans 
the people were near to starvation and the 
White Cross made us a grant. I asked them if 
they would let me build a wharf with it and 
they told me to go ahead. The stone is all 
taken from the rocks about the bay. There is 
enough granite here to build every house in 
Ireland, and we’re quarrying it.” 

“Why, you’re the providence of the town,” 
I cry. 

“It’s only common sense with good will be- 

[ 54 ] 





“BETTER * LIVING” 






hind it,” says Gallagher almost apologetically. 
“But you’ll be interested to know how we 
came to see what a help a wharf would be 
to us.” 

Patrick’s tone has meaning in it. 

“The Tans got it into their heads we were 
harboring men who were ‘on the run.’ Maybe 
they weren’t so far wrong. So they deter¬ 
mined to starve us out. You see, we used to 
get most of our foodstuffs from Derry. So the 
military commandant issued an order that no 
food was to be sent to Donegal, either by rail 
or sea.” 

“And what did you do?” 

“I went to Cardiff and bought a small vessel. 
I took it to Scotland and loaded it with provi¬ 
sions. The Scotch woul<J raise a howl if their 
business were interfered with. We counted on 
that. We sailed from Glasgow with the ship 
loaded to the gunwale and ran the blockade 
of the warships that were patroling the coast 
and brought our cargo safe to port. We made 
several trips and always came through safe.” 

“It must have been a shock to the Derry 
folks.” 

Patrick nods. “I went down there to pay 
some outstanding bills. ‘How are you getting 


[ 55 ] 





£4 REBEL • IRELAND 


on in Dungloe?’ they asked, charitably hoping 
we were starving. ‘We’re getting on very 
nicely,’ says I; ‘we have good friends in 
America, you see. We’ll not need to be bother¬ 
ing you Derry men for food after this.’ They 
were thunderstruck and, that very night, the 
Derry Chamber of Commerce held a meeting. 
The result was that the embargo was raised in 
a hurry. But it was too late. We had found 
that, by importing direct, we could save a 
pound a ton in transport. Now you know why 
we’re building that wharf.” 

The beneficence of the Dungloe co-op does 
not end here. The streets are lighted by elec¬ 
tricity. The co-op supplies the power; the 
townspeople only pay for the upkeep of the 
lamps and poles and wiring. The time is not 
far off when electricity will light every house 
in the place. The power will be furnished by 
a watercourse. Gallagher bought the rights 
from Lord Conyngham. 

“Have you done anything to improve the 
social life of the people?” I inquire. 

“We’ve made a beginning; but there are 
difficulties in the way. You see, though, we are 
making the town more attractive.” 

And there you have the story of Dungloe. 


[ 56 ] 





“BETTER • LIVING” 






What has been done in Donegal can be done 
all over Ireland. 

But there must be the creative idea and a 
brain in which it takes definite form, and char¬ 
acter, too, to overcome obstacles. 

Fortunately for Ireland she has the dis¬ 
interested guidance of Sir Horace Plunkett, 
aristocrat by best of all titles—worth and the 
will to serve. 

We meet at Plunkett House and discuss the 
means by which the people are to be kept from 
leaving the land and drifting into the cities. 

“It isn’t by imitating the city that the coun¬ 
try will be made more attractive,” says Sir 
Horace. “I grant you that the trolley and the 
auto, the telephone and broadcasting do a 
great deal to break up the loneliness of the 
country. But how do they do it? By awakening 
a desire for the things of the city. That is not 
a remedy, for no matter how rapidly the coun¬ 
try may adopt city ways, the city advances 
more rapidly. 

“The fault lies with our system of education. 
It is made for city people. There is no love of 
Mother Earth in it. If you are to make the 
country grateful to the people who live in it, 
they must be taught to read the soil as they 


[ 57 ] 





REBEL • IRELAND 


& 


C* 


would a book. Agriculture is both science and 
poetry. Read the Georgies, if you doubt me; 
steep yourself in Richard Jefferies and Hud¬ 
son. To live happily in the country men must 
know how to make the earth bring forth its 
plenty; they must feel the wonder of it as 
Wordsworth did.” 

To Sir Horace Plunkett Ireland owes the 
great co-operative movement which we have 
seen so strikingly illustrated at Dungloe. 

Denmark was competing with Ireland in the 
English market. She even sent her produce 
into Ireland. 

That was thirty years ago. Sir Horace found 
that the Danes had harnessed science to dairy¬ 
ing and organized the people on the business 
side. He concluded that, if Ireland was to hold 
her own, she must follow Denmark’s example. 

He worked out a plan so to organize the 
farmers that the small producer would have 
the advantage of large-scale business. This 
could only be done if the people would pull 
together. Individually they could not afford 
the machinery needed for modern dairying; 
collectively, however, they could buy it. 

The baronet went up and down the country, 
preaching the doctrine of co-operation. He ad- 


[ 58 ] 





“BETTER • LIVING” 


<N 


C*> 


dressed fifty meetings before the first society 
was started. 

Up to that time dairying had been carried 
on by the women as a home industry. Under 
the inspiration of Sir Horace the Irish co- 
operators bought separators, steam-churns and 
butter-makers. 

The idea succeeded in spite of the opposition 
of the upholders of “the sacred right of middle 
profits. ,, 

It was sought to make the movement profit¬ 
able to all concerned. Profit in excess of five 
per cent was divided—not among the share¬ 
holders, but among the suppliers of milk or 
among the workers in the institution. It be¬ 
came everybody’s interest to work for success. 

Organized at first exclusively for dairying, 
the societies soon perceived that they could 
advantageously extend the field of operations. 
The outcome of this development was the gen¬ 
eral purposes store, which supplied domestic 
commodities, did banking and insurance. 

All that science could contribute to the 
bettering of farming was made use of. Event¬ 
ually the government stepped in. A Depart¬ 
ment of Agricultural and Technical Instruc¬ 
tion was formed. The societies furthered the 


[ 59 ] 





PQ REBEL • IRELAND 


same ideal by the establishment of the Irish 
Agricultural Organization Society, which un¬ 
dertook, as part of its usefulness, the training 
of experts in dairying, the treatment of flax 
and general business. 

By 1920, the twenty-ninth year of the move¬ 
ment, the number of societies had grown to 
1114, with a membership of 157,766, and an 
annual turnover of £14,500,000. 

Today the attempt is being made to give 
co-operation a social direction. If people can 
combine for business, why not for recreation? 
Village halls are being built on the model of 
the American Grange. Here the people can 
listen to music, dance, attend lectures and 
classes. The movement is being linked up with 
the activities of the Gaelic League. 

In the words of AE: “If this tendency goes 
on, as I have no doubt it will, because it is 
economically beneficial, we shall find rural 
Ireland in the next generation with endless 
rural communities, each governing an area of 
about four or five miles round the center of 
business, all buying together, manufacturing 
together, marketing together, using their or¬ 
ganization for educational as well as for busi¬ 
ness purposes. This again will be linked up 


[ 6o ] 





£4 “BETTER * LIVING” 


with a national federation, or groups of them 
may combine for enterprises too great for 
parish organizations to undertake singly. I 
hope in Ireland for some thousands of healthy, 
governing economic communities—minute na¬ 
tions in fact, leaving but little for central gov¬ 
ernment to do for them.’ , 

In some ways the outlook is more hopeful 
in the country than it is in the towns. The 
slums of Dublin are some of the worst in the 
world. There are twenty thousand families 
with only one room apiece to live in. Their 
plight was described to me by Mr. J. P. O’Shea, 
president of the Irish Industrial Development 
Association. After quoting Alderman Tom 
Kelly’s dictum that, if it were not for the slums 
of Dublin, the British army could not exist, 
he said: 

“The great deterrent from useful industrial 
life is the atmosphere in which the young 
people grow up. A lad goes home to a tene¬ 
ment; he sleeps in an attic with his mother 
and sisters. They are all herded together in 
one room. Going at seven o’clock in the morn¬ 
ing, I found one of my boys sleeping in a room 
so foul that I had to light my pipe and smoke 
hard to endure the almost intolerable atmos- 


[ 61 ] 





PQ REBEL • IRELAND 


phere. How can you get good work out of lads 
who live in the midst of pollution like that? 
And it exists in Ireland on a very large scale.” 

But we need not be weighed down by pes¬ 
simism. The spirit which has changed the 
status of the small farmer from virtual serfdom 
to economic independence can operate a trans¬ 
formation equally beneficial in the city. 

The all important thing is to set the rising 
generation on the right track. With an educa¬ 
tional ideal, like that which Padraic Pierse 
put into practice at St. Enda’s College, the 
youth of the cities will grow up to lives of 
practical usefulness, humane in sympathy and 
constructively Gaelic. Not to cram, not to in¬ 
doctrinate, but “to help the child to realize 
himself at his best and worthiest”; that was 
Pierse’s aim. He wanted men to think for 
themselves, hew out their own way, evolve an 
ideal and cleave to it. 


[ 62 ] 





THE•SPIRIT•OF•THE•GAEL 


The Spirit of the Gael 



EAVING Ireland, the feeling that remains 


with me is not one of distress at the blood¬ 


shed that is going on, but of hope born of the 
consciousness that the Irish soul has not lost 
its orientation. 

The war has cleared the mist from the peo¬ 
ple’s eyes. They see plainly today that the 
Free State is not a free state, but a subject 
state and, until Ireland is free in very truth, 
her people will never be content. 

De Valera and his followers have stamped 
in indelible characters on the consciousness of 
the Irish people the fact that they have never 
consented to be subjects of a foreign power 
and the resolution that, come what may, they 
never will. 

The have vindicated the right of small na¬ 
tions to realize their destiny in their own way, 
and not to have imposed on them an alien 
civilization. 

Had they done otherwise they would have 
been unfaithful to the race spirit. To that spirit 
the Anglo-Saxon view of life is antipathetic. 
English policy sets the ambition of the rich 


[ 63 ] 





£4 REBEL • IRELAND ^ 


above the needs of the poor; it worships the 
god of capitalism and compromises with the 
ideal. 

To preserve the Irish people from this mate¬ 
rialistic blight Nature has conspired with the 
genius of the race. 

Dwelling apart, in an island lashed by the 
ocean surge, the Irish have never lost their 
wonder at the miracle of existence. The mys¬ 
tery is always with them. Voices of hill and 
stream, the ever-changing wraiths of the mist, 
the green mantle of earth are forever speak¬ 
ing to them of the riddle which the soul would 
fain solve, but all our learning leaves still 
unanswered. 

A bare sufficiency—a pittance it would seem 
to the average American—will content them, 
so long as they can gratify those idiosyn¬ 
crasies which have made them the despair of 
English statesmen. So congenial do they find 
the view of life which they have inherited from 
their ancestors that, for centuries, they have 
chosen to be outlaws rather than conform to 
an alien regime. 

Ireland has ever been Rebel Ireland. Her 
people have never bowed the neck to the for¬ 
eign yoke. Through ages of tyranny the torch 


[ 64 ] 





THE • SPIRIT • OF • THE • GAEL 


of freedom has been kept alight. It flamed in 
the hands of Red Hugh O’Donnell; Patrick 
Sarsfield brandished it in the face of the foe; 
Robert Emmet held it in his dying grasp; 
today it shines gloriously from the hiding- 
place of Eamonn de Valera and, if he should 
die, another will take it up. 

These men lived for an idea; for an idea 
they were willing to die and, because the prin¬ 
ciple for which they stood is deep-rooted in 
the hearts of honest folk, the people have held 
their teaching sacred and taught it to their 
children. Spoiled of their lands, they cultivated 
fen and wilderness; deprived of the advantages 
of education, they learned to read from grave¬ 
stones by the light of the moon; persecuted 
for conscience’s sake, they remained steadfast 
in their belief. 

Theirs was an elder civilization, begotten of 
the wisdom of the folk, uncontaminated by 
foreign ideas. The beauty and vitality of the 
ancient culture of Ireland are the expression 
of the genius of the Celt and, for that reason, 
the Irish have clung to it with a grip which 
war and oppression have been powerless to 
loosen. 

A patriarchal people with a strong com- 

[ 6 S ] 



> > 





* 


REBEL•IRELAND ^ 


munal instinct, rulers and folk held a relation¬ 
ship one to the other that had much in it of the 
kindliness of the family tie. The people had 
the use of the land for grazing and raising 
crops. The clan yielded the chief fealty; they 
fought under his leadership; he was their chief 
because they felt him to be the best man; he 
ruled them with a paternal sway that took cog¬ 
nizance alike of the welfare of the soul and 
the welfare of the body. 

The memory of these things has never been 
eradicated. It is the memory of a primitive 
stock which, for ages, dwelt in the selfsame 
spot. They read the riddle of life in an environ¬ 
ment from which Druid sage, Christian ascetic, 
and poet of the folk have alike drawn inspira¬ 
tion. Pagan cairn, the “beehives” of dimly 
remembered communities of scholars, Chris¬ 
tian towers and abbeys all left their imprint 
on the mind of the race and, wedded with the 
lore that is born of the dreaming of simple 
folk, endowed it with a childlike grace. Nature- 
worship and Christianity blended into a pic¬ 
turesque mythology, and the doings of poets, 
saints and heroes added their glamor. 

The Irish would none of English culture: 
it was not their own. But Mother Erin, “the 

[ 66 ] 





THE • SPIRIT * OF • THE • GAEL 


Poor old Woman/’ they loved. She was flesh 
of their flesh and bone of their bone. In a 
thousand tales and poems she reminded them 
that Ireland was a land of scholars when Eng¬ 
land was the cockpit of warring barbarians. 
The law of her Brehons was hoar with an¬ 
tiquity when St. Patrick came to preach the 
gospel of Christ. Why should her people have 
recourse to the harsh code of the stranger, 
when they had a tribal law which for untold 
generations had satisfied all their needs? 
Within the Pale the English king might en¬ 
force his will; but, beyond its confines the 
royal writ was disregarded. 

Rack-rented of the last penny his poor hold¬ 
ing would yield, the Irish laborer knew in the 
heart of him that he was the victim of an 
odious tyranny. It needed no schooling to 
teach him that the law which made a criminal 
of him for going to Mass was an unjust law. 
So he thought of the past, when the people of 
his clan tilled the soil and grazed their flocks 
unmolested, when they traded with peoples 
beyond sea without let or hindrance, and wor¬ 
shiped God as conscience bade them. These 
things he could not forget and, thinking of 
them, he hated the foreigner. 


[ 67 ] 




REBEL • IRELAND 






If England could have rooted out of their 
minds the tradition of the Gaelic past, she 
might have made them over in the Britannic 
image. But to do that was beyond her strength. 
Chieftains might be quelled by fear or seduced 
by bribery; but the common people were in¬ 
corruptible. 

They were incorruptible from common sense 
and from idealism. From common sense be¬ 
cause they knew that English rule meant the 
domination of a grasping aristocracy. From 
idealism because their conception of well-being 
was aesthetic as well as utilitarian. The picture 
of Irish life in “The Deserted Village” has 
been assailed as unhistorical; but no one 
steeped in Irish thought will deny that it is a 
faithful representation of the village dear to 
the imagination of the Gael. 

Life is a beautiful thing, and the rebellious¬ 
ness of the Irish has ever been directed against 
those who would steal that beauty away. To 
this instinct for life’s finer aspects they have 
been immemorially faithful, and it is fidelity to 
what is best in the soul of the race that makes 
the Irishman one of the world’s best fighters, 
not for Erin only, but for humanity. 

To live in assured content a man must own 


[ 68 ] 





THE • SPIRIT • OF • THE • GAEL 


his home and be lord of his little patch of 
ground. This the Irishman knows. It is part of 
the wisdom of the race. Attachment to the 
sanctities of the hearth, the love of beauty, and 
the determination to have and to hold these 
things at any cost constitute the value of the 
Irishman in the building up of a civilization 
that will wear well, not for himself only, but 
for all peoples. 

Nothing will satisfy the Irish but the oppor¬ 
tunity to work out their destiny in the way 
which God has put it into their hearts to de¬ 
sire. Their longing is for something better than 
the life of the industrial serf. They want song 
and music and the contentment of men who 
draw their sustenance from the lap of Nature. 
Gleaning from their dream of things past and 
to come the untaxed rapture of fancy, they 
strive indomitably towards the realization of 
an existence more generous than anything the 
world now affords. 

Ireland protests against all manner of un¬ 
fairness that tends to confine man’s life in 
beauty-destroying channels. And she will not 
accept a view of life imposed by strangers. 
With Abraham Lincoln she believes that no 
people is good enough to govern another 


[ 69 ] 





REBEL • IRELAND 


£4 




people, and far more persistently than Ameri¬ 
cans have done, she asserts the inalienable 
right of man to “life, liberty and the pursuit 
of happiness.” 

To the understanding that their country 
shall not be used as a base of operations 
against England the Irish may agree; but take 
an oath of allegiance to England’s king they 
never will. To do that would be to give the lie 
to the whole course of their history and admit 
that the blood of the heroes has been shed in 
vain. 

Ireland is immortally rebel against every¬ 
thing that hinders her in the fulfillment of her 
destiny as a sovereign people. She will not 
entrust the steering of her bark to any hands 
but Irish hands. Weaklings may compromise; 
but no compromise will be binding on the con¬ 
science of the Irish people. The will of the 
race is against it. 

Left to her own counsels, Erin will tread 
the path of national development, eager to 
make life more beautiful, receptive of all that 
may profit her in the example of others, but 
ever clinging with a tenacious grip to the ideal 
of well-being which has come down to her from 
ancient days. 


[ 70 ] 





THE • SPIRIT • OF • THE * GAEL 


The Gael is fighting for a fuller, a better life. 
The cause of Ireland is therefore the cause of 
humanity. 


x 


[ 7 1 ] 








































PRESS OP 

THE RECORDER PRINTING AND PUBLISHING CO 
SAN FRANCISCO 



0 021 359 561 1 


Opinions on Redfem Mason’s 

“Song Lore of Ireland” 

■ 

Dr. Douglas Hyde: 

I have been reading your book with the greatest 
of pleasure and profit. I think it perfectly mar¬ 
velous how you have read yourself into the at¬ 
mosphere of the country. Hiberno Hiberniorl 


Archbishop Ireland: 

The book is one of the sweetest things on Ire¬ 
land that it has been my good fortune to read. 
It is, in every page, the pure exhalation of the 
soul of Erin, in its sadness, in its joys, in its 
sufferings, and in its triumphs. 


Justin McCarthy: 

The book is all the more valuable to me because 
it is the work of an Englishman who is thor¬ 
oughly sympathetic with the Irish nature, with 
Ireland’s history, with Irish literature and Irish 
music. 






a 

sf 




Katharine Tynan Hinkson: 

Redfem Mason must be added to the list of 
Ireland’s great servants, for his book is a most 
valuable one. . . . Legends, poetry and music 
abound. The mind of the student, yet capable 
of a childlike wonder and understanding of the 
naivete of the great days, has compiled for us 
this book of a value not to be overestimated. 






















